Mojca Marc

Total quality management and performance management systems: team players or lonely riders?

The paper investigates the joint effects of using total quality management (TQM) and performance management systems (PMSs) on the importance managers place on five different performance perspectives. Our study extends the current knowledge on the simultaneous use of multiple managerial concepts. Contrary to other studies of TQM and PMSs, we take into account that their effects are not independent from the use of other managerial concepts. Controlling for contextual variables and the use of other managerial concepts, we test the effects of joint TQM-PMS use on cross-section data from a sample of 264 companies. We find that the joint use is associated with a decrease in the perceived importance of customer perspective. This implies that only the importance of the customer measures changes for managers because they use TQM and PMS. One possible explanation for this result is that TQM companies over-emphasise the customer perspective which is ‘counter-balanced’ if PMS is jointly used. For other perspectives (employee, operational, return, and financial), we find only weak evidence of interdependencies between TQM and PMSs.

Are product market structures affected by banking concentration: Evidence from transition countries

There is growing empirical literature on the relationship between concentration in product markets and concentration in the banking sector. Cetorelli (2001, 2004) and Cetorelli and Strahan (2006) found that countries or regions with more concentrated banking sectors tend also to have more concentrated product markets, thus suggesting that the causality goes from concentration in the banking sector to concentration in product markets. These results emphasise the negative effect of banking concentration on competition in product markets and hence on efficiency and even economic growth. Similarly, Pagano (1993) provides a theoretical model and empirical evidence of an adverse effect of banking market concentration on economic growth. However, such results do not appear robust, either at the theoretical level or at the empirical level. For instance, Petersen and Rajan (1995) build a theoretical model in which banks with market power are more willing to finance young firms. They also find empirical support for such an effect. Furthermore, Hellman and DaRin (2002) propose a theory and empirical evidence showing that more concentrated banking sectors promote the development of new sectors and thus act as catalysts for industrialisation. In this paper we investigate whether the differences in the results obtained in the literature may result from the focus on different country groupings and different periods of time.